1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus having tab sheet inserting function, a method executed on the image forming apparatus, a computer readable recording medium stored with a control program for controlling the image forming apparatus, and its control method.
2. Description of the Related Art
There exist printing apparatuses that are capable of creating printed products by inserting between pages a tab sheet having a flat rectangular main body and a tab protruding at a specified position on a side of said main body. See Unexamined Publication No. 2005-271259.
In such a printing apparatus, multiple sets of tab sheets consisting of, for example, five tab sheets, whose tab positions are sequentially offset from each other, are used as constituents and are placed in a sheet supply tray. If only first three tab sheets are used in a printing job, the remaining two tab sheets, i.e., the fourth and fifth tab sheets, become no longer necessary and must be discharged. This is because it is necessary to supply tab sheets starting with the first tab sheet of a set in the execution of the next print job.
In the printing apparatus described in said document, the tab sheets that became no longer necessary are discharged to a discharge tray separate from sheets on which pages of the printing job are printed. As a result, the tab sheets that became no longer necessary can be removed easily as they are not mixed with the normally printed sheets.
However, there are cases where the user wishes to insert a plurality of types of tab sheets, e.g., a case of inserting different types of tab sheets for page locations denoting “chapter” breaks and page locations denoting “paragraph” breaks respectively. In this case, even if the tab sheets that became no longer necessary are discharged into a separate discharge tray, separate from the normally printed sheets, a plurality of types of tab sheets that became no longer necessary exist in a single discharge tray in a mixed state. Therefore, the user has to sort the tab sheets out manually if it is desired to reuse those tab sheets that became no longer necessary, so that it is a burden to the user.